In other words, neoconservatives had captured the foreign agenda. The foreign
initiatives of a unipolar state can go in all kinds of directions in the absence of
systemic constraints; ‘I distrust hegemonic power, whoever may wield it’, Waltz
said, ‘because it is so easily misused’.^17
At the same time, according to Waltz and other structural realists, unipolarity
will not last long, because rising great powers will be compelled to balance against
the United States. Structural realist logic dictates that other states will balance against
the US because offsetting US power is a means of guaranteeing one’s own security:
such balancing will eventually lead to the emergence of new great powers in a
multipolar system. ‘Realist theory predicts that balance disrupted will one day be
restored... In our perspective, the new balance is emerging slowly; in historical
perspective, it will come in the blink of an eye’.^18 The logic also dictates that NATO
will not last and that there will be increased nuclear proliferation; intensified power
competition will also emerge between European great powers. Leading structural
realists (Waltz, Mearsheimer, Layne) share these predictions.^19 In sum, now that the
common enemy has disappeared, the post-Cold War world order would be
characterized by much intensified balance-of-power competition between ‘old
friends’ both across the Atlantic and inside (Western) Europe – as anticipated by
structural realist theory.
But this has not happened. Power balancing against the US has not taken place
in a major way since the end of the Cold War. As a result, there have been various
attempts to repair the structural realist balance-of-power argument in order to
account for the new situation.^20 Some simply claim that ‘international competition
between great powers has returned with United States, Russia, China, Europe,
Japan, India, Iran and others vying for regional predominance’.^21
In sum, structural realism provides some direction as to where the world is
headed. It helps us understand the uncertainties connected with unconstrained
unipolar dominance and it rightly indicates that aggressive power balancing can still
be found in the international system. But there is so much that is squeezed out of
the picture because the theoretical straitjacket compels us to look at little else but
the power competition between states; Waltz justifies this move in the name of
parsimony, but this is probably taking the quest for parsimony too far. Structural
realism is at its finest when the pressures of competition are narrowly constraining
and compel states to particular modes of balancing behaviour. It is a much weaker
theory when the pressures of competition are less constraining so that states are not
compelled to certain forms of behaviour. This is not merely a problem connected
to the above considerations on a unipolar power whose comprehensive dominance
will probably soon be over. There is a large group of weak states that were never
constrained by the system in the ways posited by structural realism; and there is
a large group of liberal states that have gone beyond self-help in ways not con-
sidered by structural realism. These are dramatic transformations that have to do
with changes in statehood. They are most certainly ‘big and important things’
in terms of grasping prospects for war and peace, for patterns of conflict and
cooperation.
110 Structural realism and changes in statehood